U.S. SPACE COMMANDER GENERAL JOHN HYTEN ON “MULTI-DOMAIN ...
Yesterday I blogged about the coming new "space race", and the U.S. House of Representatives' desire to see NASA shift from its "direct-to-Mars" horizon goal to a return to manned Lunar missions as a stepping stone to Mars. You'll recall my argument yesterday was that this shift in policy and objectives was ultimately geo-celestial-politically motivated, given the stated intentions of China to reach, permanently base, and mine the Moon. As I argued yesterday, having a direct Mission To Mars while leaving foreign pwoers to base the Moon would be to endanger any communications between the Earth and the Red Planet to fundamental potential for interdiction of that communications lifeline. (and there's a wider context here, if you'll recall, with China wanting to build its own version of CERN's super-collider. But I digress).
Within that context, this article was shared by Ms. M.W., and I want to pass it along, together with some "high octane speculation reading-between-the-lines":
AFSPC Commander outlines vision for command at Space Symposium
Note first of all, that the general thrust of the article and of General Hyten's remarks is toward an integrative approach to military operations on planet Earth:
General Hyten began his presentation with a video highlighting the importance of space and cyber integration into everything we do in the military. The video also depicted how easily that integration can be taken away by a determined adversary if we don't properly defend our capabilities.
At the conclusion of the video, he posed the following question to the audience: "What if we lost space and cyberspace?"
General Hyten went on to elaborate on the importance of space and cyber effects on the battlefield, saying, "Those soldiers on the battlefield in the Middle East can never be left alone."
"All of the domains have to play at the same time with things happening simultaneously. That's multi-domain operations," he said.
General Hyten stressed that the Air Force is changing and moving toward a multi-domain mindset that relies on "the integration of all the domains - land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace - working together to deliver an effect in the battlefield."
"A year ago today we didn't have the term multi-domain operations," said General Hyten. "Multi-domain means it doesn't matter where effect comes from, what domain we use or what platform as long as it creates an effect on the battlefield. That's multi-domain operations. That is fundamentally different from the way we operate today."
So far, soo good: here is nothing here we have not heard before: dominance of the high ground of space is essential to military operations on Earth. We've been hearing this ever since Lyndon Johnson was Senate Majority leader in the late 1950s, helping Dwight Eisenhower in the creation of NASA in the first place.
But then there's a subtle shift:
General Hyten expressed the importance of the Joint Interagency Space Operations Center in building a resilient enterprise, saying, "We have done three experiments, lasting about three weeks apiece. In those experiments we have learned a lot of things including that the intelligence community is the key to everything. The most important thing about the JICSpOC right now that we maintain a tight partnership with the entire National Security Space community."
He then laid out specific ways AFSPC is organizing, training, and equipping Airmen to operate in a threatened operating environment.
"We need to train a Space Mission Force. We need our space operators focused on what to do in case of a threat and to operate through the threat environment," General Hyten said. "We have to change the way we train our Airmen."
SMF is designed to make space operator training and crew force resemble the rest of the Air Force. The cornerstone of SMF is the creation of a twin crew force. One crew will be in the fight, operating the mission, while the other crew force is in garrison receiving advanced training. The crews will switch every four months so they continue to gain experience through training and then apply that training in real world operations.
General Hyten also highlighted the need to focus on equipping forces with more resilient capabilities, explaining how AFSPC "came up with something called a Threat-Focused Space Enterprise Vision, the Space Enterprise Vision for short. If war does extend into space someday, and I hope it never does, the first response is not going to be in space. The first response could be in cyberspace, or the air, or terrestrial or any number of places meaning we must share common information across various domains. In other words, space Enterprise Vision."
(Emphasis added)
Now, I do not know about you, but what this sounds like is (1) "we need to be prepared for an actual war in space" and (2) we need to be aable to think in terms of all servicce branches being involved in prosecuting sucha potential war." You'll note Generl Hyten lays great stress onn new training of airmen, but the implication of his remarks is that all service branchs will have to be retrained to fight such a war: soldiers, for example, will need to be retrained not only to fight on the ground on Earth, but presumably, on other types of "territory." Implicit also in the remarks is the need to respond to space-based threats from the Earth, via cyber warfare and other platforms.
In short, and viewed in the context of yesterday's blog, it defiinitely appears that the US military is beginning the transition from a merely terrestrially-based force with merely terrestrial missions, to a long term strategic mission of being capable too fight a war extended into space.
The real question is, is it really just China or Russsia that they're worried about?
See you on the flip side...
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I agree with you Basta , it’s just to suck more taxpayer cash down the black hole, none of these governments are going to outer space lol
Sounds to me like a lot of pie-in-the sky tech jargon to justify a big, fat budget.
If a war ever kicks off with a truly capable opponent, it will be over in less than a half hour, and all these superflous “capabilities” will have meant squat.
unless they want to string the war along to sustain the economic recovery that they say comes with all that defense spending. remember the engagement rules pilots had to fly by for vietnam?
Marching orders for tight formations; training cannon fodder in real world urban warfare; preparing minds to accept an enemy is invading soon[when we’ve, in fact, already been invaded a long time ago]; new enemies can be found simply, by looking closely into the mirror.
Add to cyberspace and outer space: the space between your skull; it is there that you will find how far the landscape of betrayal extends, befitting the surveillance that envelopes you.
Is this what your fighting FOR?
I also viewed this article in context of the blog last week regarding the Army General’s speech about having to deal with a multitude issues all at the same time including those “little green men”
“We need to train a Space Mission Force. We need our space operators focused on what to do in case of a threat and to operate through the threat environment,” General Hyten said. “We have to change the way we train our Airmen.”
The first thing I thought of when I read the above was “SG-1”
Good Grief, now he is using the term “Enterprise”!
General Hyten also highlighted the need to focus on equipping forces with more resilient capabilities, explaining how AFSPC “came up with something called a Threat-Focused Space Enterprise Vision, the Space Enterprise Vision for short.
SoCal G, you bring up some interesting points about the use of popular-culture ‘code words’ of science fiction. I am curious whether this is some form of psyop language (von Braun schedule), or whether this is code for moving forward into some form of disclosure.
Incidentally, I was at Edwards AFB and NASA Dryden when the “Enterprise” was first blown-off the 747 carrier aircraft. Wow! A USAF project I was working on required a trip to there. My project and the shuttle flight each kept delaying, so it was purely ‘chance’ if I would be in the right place at the right time.
Well, eventually, my project had its meeting and the “Enterprise” takeoff was scheduled the very next day! I had a NASA engineer friend that put me up at his house overnight (thanks!) and got me into Dryden the next day.
When the moment came, we all piled out onto the pavement and watched the Enterprise/747 stack taxi past. If you think a 747 is big, try a 747 with a shuttle orbiter on top! Seventh heaven for an aerospace engineer…
The big moment came when they blew the shuttle away from the 747. Wind tunnel data and computer modeling had said it was okay, but all the engineers knew something ‘unexpected’ could happen. Great cheers when the word came over the PA system that it came off (pun) without a hitch. Also, great relief and cheering when “Enterprise” flared successfully and made a perfect landing onto the Edwards dry lakebed. Awesome.
One of the best days of my life!
Very cool story!
Since the US had trained their Super Soldier, I suppose they can use them to fight whatever space war they are going after, whoever answer to this type of call – We Want you! It is their choice, if majorities of us DO NOT take SIDE, we are ok, just look at what happen to the Sumerian god’s city, the city got destroy and it is citizen gone down with it, because the citizens took side with their god!
Shades of the new tv series The Colony a planetary concentration-slave labor-liquidation camp. With the Norman ruling class as our overlords a space sword of Damocles held over our collective heads.
Ra will have the last word – with a big burp and a shimmy.
I do believe the tech press’s vision of cyberwarfare being one game anyone can play. Among other pieces of evidence was the quick publication of instructions on how to decrypt Mac OS X and Linux hard drives that ransomeware was holding up. Windows instructions came later (and too late for some institutions) but you get what you pay for and a lot of what we pay for is sheepishness.
India has a long history in the “non-aligned” movement and its space program is starting to get some real traction, so while I don’t consider it a hostile player here in any sense I do see it as a potential source for such threatening technologies literally anyone should be able to buy one way or another. Is North Korea crazy enough to try space war on us without their backer? Yes, and they are probably already waging cyber-war. So of course we are worried about more than Russia and China.
My doubts about Mr. Global’s omnipotence don’t reassure me. People say polite things about this new “Internet of Things” but the truth is there is nothing polite to say about what passes for security on it. I am surprised nobody’s been arrested for selling footage taken from some stranger’s smart tv yet. So yes, what General Hyten has to say makes sense to me – though the context isn’t at all reassuring. I read it and say “How far behind are we?”
Terrorism seems to be their creature and one they control at the highest levels. A black ops group of useful you know what to achieve certain police state objectives in the west. Mr. Global’s greatest cyber threat is nationalists trying to preserve freedom and wholesomeness in their cultures in the infowars which Mr. Global is clearly losing. Second biggest threat to Mr. Global is rebellious nation state holdouts taking out all their crucial satelites of which their whole control grid relies upon. With weaponized, spy, and communications satelites becoming more and more vulnerable and obsolete with emerging ballistic missle and other technologies it appears there is now a race to be the first to put military assets on the Moon. Too many problems and natural vulnerabilities with high orbiting satelites to keep them up there for long but the Moon would overcome these issues.